My current research interests spread across the disparate fields of bureaucratic politics and political engagement. My work on bureaucratic politics focuses on examining the extent of political influence on the regulatory scope and enforcement outputs of federal and state-level regulatory agencies.
My work on political engagement focuses on isolating key factors for promoting political engagement among young citizens without simultaneously triggering partisan polarization and uncivil discourse.
My research interests include practice evaluation, integrated care and the treatment of trauma, and social work and chronic health care.
Engineering and Technology Management
My research interests includes two major areas. The first one is the development and validation of measurement instruments, including student assessments and survey instruments. My work in this area has been published in the most respected scholarly journals and presented at national and international conferences.
The second area is applications of research methodology into broader areas in educational practices, such as design and scoring mathematics performance assessment, developing and validating social and emotional learning survey instrument, assessing non-cognitive skills, and evaluating educational curricula and instructional programs. My work in this area is reflected in my numerous refereed publications and presentations at national and international organizations, scholarly collaboration with other faculty members within and outside of Widener, and doctoral students.
The highlights of my research are: (1) a prestigious research grant (Co-PI with professors from the University of Delaware and Marquette University, $1.5 million) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2010-2015; (2) a research grant funded by the Lindback Foundation, and (3) my leadership role and long-term research activities in the development of the Widener Emotional Learning Survey and in the promotion of student social and emotional learning. I have also been invited to serve as a psychometric/statistical consultant for a number of national and international research projects.
My research interests lie in the fields of analytical chemistry, environmental chemistry, membrane technology, and electrochemistry. In particular, I am interested in (1) developing methods for analysis of pollutants; (2) exploring the fate of the pollutants during natural processes and anthropogenic activities; (3) synthesizing functional membranes for the separation and purification of water; and (4) using catalytic electrochemical reactions as a sustainable technique for degradation of pollutants in the aquatic environment.
While most of my research has used electro-chemical processes, I am also interested in using other techniques such as nanotechnology and am open to interdepartmental collaborations. I hope to involve students in the research process.
I have two general, but complementary, lines of research interest. My primary interest falls within mental health disparities, while my secondary interest lies in subjective well-being research. Within mental health disparities, I examine the measurement equivalence of commonly used psychological measures. I am also passionate about examining variations in prevalence rates of mental health conditions and social determinants of health among different racial/ethnic groups. Specifically, I am interested in how socioeconomic status, gender, geographic location, language, immigrant status, and culture impact behaviors and well-being across racial/ethnic groups. Within subjective well-being research, I am curious about what factors influence people’s happiness, resilience, meaning of life, and quality of life.
My main research interest is in C*-algebras and their use in mathematical physics and non-commutative (differential) geometry. More specifically, my interest is automorphic group actions on C*-algebras and their associated fixed point sub-algebras and crossed-product algebras, with particular interest in rotation algebras and their generalizations. Recently, however, I have been looking at some ideas in the intersection of probability, linear algebra, and elementary number theory involving the notions of independence and roundness.
My research interests focus on molecular mechanisms, that is the activities at the DNA, RNA, or protein level that influence cellular and thereby organismal properties. I also have long standing interests in embryonic and post-embryonic development. In my research here at Widener, I have applied molecular biological techniques to the study of the embryology of horseshoe crabs, the muscle physiology of fish, and the immune responses of frogs.
My research projects have been undertaken with the twin goals of increasing biological knowledge in these areas and supporting participation by undergraduate students. My students and I have an enormous amount of fun learning together, and I take great pride in the accomplishments of each and every one of them.
My current project is on gene expression in horseshoe crab embryos (Limulus polyphemus). My students work to identify previously unknown genes and determine their expression patterns during embryonic development in these organisms.
My clinical research interests relate to providing best practice and evidence to enhance occupational therapy practice in the acute care, rehabilitation and stoke and brain injury populations.
My research focuses on sexual health behavior and the social, developmental, contextual, and psychological factors that influence sexual decision-making, particularly in substance-involved contexts. My overarching professional goals are to produce theoretically grounded research that informs understandings of sexual health behavior, thus providing specific targets on which to intervene to improve sexual health outcomes.
To address these research aims, I conduct research wherein I employ a variety of methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods designs. In the pursuit of these goals, I apply social psychological perspectives to investigate two overarching questions that guide my research agenda: (1) What are the social influences on sexual health behaviors and for whom and how are those factors influential? and (2) What are the psychosocial factors involved in sexual decisions and relationships and what are the mechanisms of action and interaction among these factors?.
I am interested in management accounting and financial accounting topics including control systems, judgment and decision making of managers and other financial statement users, ethical management practices, and sustainability and financial reporting. My research addresses accounting issues with interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from strategy, management, sociology, and psychology, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
My primary research focuses on moral language and its practical significance. What do we use it to do? Why would we have a discursive practice with this function? And how does its function shed light on the norms that structure the practice? This was the topic of my dissertation, which I'm now working to turn into my first book.
I also work on our practices of holding one another accountable to shared moral norms. I'm interested in what kind of standing one has to have in order to successfully hold someone to the oughts that bind them and the social practices that either support or undermine this standing. My present project aims to understand how the fragmentation of thick community relations instigated by the rise of social media, the decline in civic organizations and organized religion, and changing economic realities has made it more difficult for us to hold one another accountable.
I'm also interested in jokes, and, in particular, how jokes can be used to ease communication about difficult subjects.
My areas of expertise include organizational leadership, collaborative inquiry communities, and developing mentor practices. My current research focuses on how to develop and support productive learning communities within schools and classrooms, including how to support faculty and graduate student success. In addition, I focus on the development of these ideas through the use of instructional technology in online spaces, such as through online and hybrid courses, and faculty and school-based professional development.
My book manuscript, Publishing Personality: Romantic Periodicals and the Paradox of Living Authorship, examines how the media environment of the British Romantic periodical plays host to an extended attempt to theorize, narrativize, and stabilize the meaning of the contemporary, crystallizing it through the figure of the living author. Caught between the copyright accorded to books, and their own position as paid piece-workers, periodical writers identify the ‘living author’ as a problematic state—stressing the conditional, serial features of authorship in practice, and probing the uncertainty of contemporary judgments about literary value, authorial life, and even truth. My chapters survey crises and scandals in the periodical sphere; from the famous personal attacks on Keats and Leigh Hunt, to the misogynistic reviewing of female novelists like Fanny Burney and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), to the uproar over the political apostasies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. I argue that periodicals understand the living author as incarnating the problems of making sense of a rapidly-changing contemporary world. Paradoxically, the periodical’s vexed engagement with the living author as a threat ends up elaborating the concept, constructing publication as a guarantor of self and identity and the periodical as the space where the author can construct a sense of truth and authenticity, even at times in defiance of the material realities that surround them.
I am also at work on a digital humanities project, which involves the production of a TEI-compliant edition of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine series “Noctes Ambrosianae”. This collaboratively-authored magazine series has proved a source of enduring delight and scandal (for its contemporaries) and of scholarly fascination (for Romanticists today). The edition does not merely reproduce the portion of the series produced under the leadership of John Gibson Lockhart, but also tags important semantic and textual features including the use of languages and dialects, the representation of historical figures, and the inscription or performance of different attributes of class, gender, and nationality. With the end goal enhanced searchability and extractability, the edition aims to promote engagement with the series from scholars across Romantic literary and historical studies. Undergraduate students in Widener University’s Textual Scholarship Certificate Program contribute to the production of the edition.
My research interests include violence prevention and reentry; clinical social work practice; treatment of serious mental illness; children and adolescents; critical incident stress management with emergency service workers; trauma; crisis intervention; collaborative work with criminal justice; social and emotional competence; interagency collaboration; and organizational management.
My primary research interests lie in commutative algebra and its interactions with algebraic geometry. I have worked on plucker formulas, generalized Hilbert functions, and multipolicies as well as Chunovsky's conjecture. My secondary research interest focuses on the active control of beam and string systems.
Green chemistry, also known as sustainable chemistry, is the design, development and implementation of chemical products and processes to reduce or eliminate the use and generation of substances hazardous to human health and the environment. Under the principles of green chemistry, my research focuses on the design, synthesis, characterization and modification of solid-state inorganic or inorganic-organic hybrid materials for sustainable energy application, particularly in the area of gas storage, rechargeable batteries and thermal energy storage.
